Early Graves Read Free Page A

envelope in ballpoint ink that the rain began to smear at once. He lifted the envelope to his mouth to lick the flap, then didn’t lick it. Instead, he folded the flap and fastened it with the little metal prongs provided.
    Dave said, “You’re afraid of catching it.”
    “You damn right,” Leppard said. “Aren’t you?” Dave felt cold in the pit of his stomach. Not for himself. For Cecil. Suppose that cry of denial had been false this morning. Suppose his shock at seeing Dodge sitting here had been deeper than he showed. Suppose Dodge had been Cecil’s answer to a need Chrissie couldn’t fulfill. And Dave wouldn’t fulfill out of a stubborn sense of rectitude.
    “It kills you in eighteen months,” Leppard said. “But that’s not the worst.” His expression was wooden. Dave knew a joke was coming. “The worst is, you lose all this weight. I couldn’t wear any of my clothes. Hell, half of them aren’t even paid for yet.”
    “Eighteen months makes killing them seem pointless,” Dave said. “Who is this crazy with a knife?”
    “Somebody who always hated queers. Like the religious nuts. All he needed was AIDS to set him off. I don’t know. But eighteen months gets precious when it’s all you’ve got. You said Cecil brought you home from LAX.”
    “But he doesn’t live here anymore. He’s got an apartment in Mar Vista. He married Christina Streeter, remember? The foreign correspondent’s daughter?”
    “Pretty blind girl,” Leppard said. “Slipped my mind.”
    “Because it didn’t fit your equation,” Dave said.
    Out in front, the heavy rear door of the coroner’s wagon thudded shut. The side doors slammed. The starter whinnied, the engine rumbled, and in the damp noon quiet they could hear the tires crunch twigs as the black car rolled off down the canyon.
    “What equation is that?” Leppard said.
    “That I was homosexual, which meant Cecil was homosexual, and homosexuals don’t marry. You don’t want to think in accepted patterns, Lieutenant. Not in your job. Not about people in crises. I’ve been dealing with them for forty years. They seldom do what you expect.”
    Leppard looked at him but didn’t answer. He drew breath. “The connection could be Junipero Serra hospital. The first five were all in there, one time or another. Maybe this one was too. They get sick a lot. That’s what the virus does.”
    “Right,” Dave said. “Knocks out the immune system.”
    “So they go in for swollen lymph glands,” Leppard said. “Or night sweats. Or diarrhea that won’t stop.” The rain began to come down hard. He winced up at it, hunched his shoulders, moved toward the cookshack at the side of the courtyard. Dave followed him. “Or sudden weight loss. Or weakness—can’t stand on their legs to get dressed to go to work.”
    Dave opened the cookshack door for him, reached in and switched on lights, followed Leppard inside. Leppard un-snapped his raincoat. The stiff plastic rattled as he got out of it and hung it on a brass wall hook by the door. Dave closed the door, and began to look into cupboards.
    Leppard said, “Or they get pneumonia. Or blue spots on the skin that turn into lesions.”
    “Kaposi’s sarcoma.” Dave brought sour rye bread from a cupboard. “Intestinal parasites. Brain parasites.” He found butter, cheese, mayonnaise in a big refrigerator whose state-of-the-art works were disguised behind the oaken doors of a very old icebox. “I know they go in and out. Until they’re too sick, too blind, or too crazy to go out again alive.” He set the stuff from the refrigerator on the counter. “Sit down. A drink? They didn’t go to any other hospitals?”
    “Sure.” Leppard drew out a pine chair at an old deal table scoured white, and sat down. “But Junipero Serra is a constant. I’m thinking of that male nurse a few years back, who killed all those dying old people.”
    “Not out in the street,” Dave said. “Not in some parking garage, some driveway. In